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November 2005 - Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Biography - Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, one of the writers of the twentieth- century Native American Literary Renaissance, is the author of three novellas, From the River's Edge, Circle of Dancers, and In the Presence of River Gods, published as Aurelia by the University Press of Colorado in 1999, and a collection of short stories, The Power of Horses and Other Stories (1990). She has written two poetry chapbooks, The Badger Said This (1984), and Seek the House of Relatives (1986), and a full-length book of selected and new poems, I Remember The Fallen Trees (1998). Her Collection of essays, Why I can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996), was awarded the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997, and a nonfiction work, The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1998), co-authored with Lakota attorney Mario Gonzalez, was published by the University of Illinois Press.
Cook-Lynn is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, Fort Thompson, and lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She is a Recipient of an Oyate Igluwitaya award given by native university students in South Dakota, an award that refers to those who "aid in the ability of the people to see clearly in the company of each other." Since her Retirement from Eastern Washington University, she has been a Visiting Professor and Consultant in Native American Studies at Arizona State University at Tempe, and a writer-in-residence at several universities.